Jan 22, 2015

Ubuntu Flavors 15.04 Vivid Vervet Alpha 2 Available For Testing

The second alpha for the Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet flavors (Kubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Lubuntu and Ubuntu Kylin) has been released. Let's take a quick look at what's new.

As usual, Ubuntu (w/ Unity) doesn't take part in alpha releases. Also, the Ubuntu flavors not mentioned above (like Xubuntu) didn't take part in the Vivid alpha 2 milestone.

Ubuntu GNOME 15.04 Vivid Vervet Alpha 2

In Ubuntu GNOME 15.04 Vivid Vervet alpha 2, most GNOME components have been updated to the latest 3.14 version - this includes GNOME Shell, GNOME Control Center/Settings Daemon, Nautilus, Maps, Weather, Evince, Terminal and so on. Unfortunately, there are still a couple of apps that are quite old: Gedit and Videos (Totem), which are still at version 3.10.

Here are a few more Ubuntu GNOME 15.04 Vivid Vervet alpha 2 screenshots:

Another minor, but interesting change, is that Numix GTK theme is now installed by default. Adwaita continues to be used by default but Numix GTK theme is now jus a few clicks away:

Ubuntu Kylin 15.04 Vivid Vervet alpha 2

Ubuntu Kylin (an Ubuntu flavor for Chinese users) Vivid Vervet alpha 2 ships with LIM (locally integrated menus) enabled by default, with the new "always-show-menus" featured turned on, so it doesn't use autohide:

Also, the latest Kylin 15.04 alpha 2 release comes with "click to minimize" enabled by default for the Unity launcher, a feature that's of course, also available for Ubuntu (w/ Unity) users, but it's not enabled by default.

According to the release notes, these changes are meant to "make Windows users easier to adapt to the Unity user interface".

Here are a few more Ubuntu Kylin 15.04 alpha 2 screenshots (note that I installed Ubuntu Kylin in English, but some parts are not translated, that's why you'll see a mix of English and Chinese in the screenshots):

Lubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet alpha 2

For Lubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet alpha 2, there's no changelog available - the wiki page mentions that the "LXQt is still in development, so Vivid Vervet is another bug fix release. ". So it looks like LXQt won't make it in Lubuntu 15.04.

All the Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet alpha 2 flavors include Xorg server 1.16.2.901, Mesa 10.3.2 (but Mesa 10.4.2 is available in proposed) and the Ubuntu Linux kernel 3.18.0-9.10 which is based on the upstream 3.18.2 Linux kernel (for changes in Linux 3.18, see THIS page)

Up next in the Vivid Vervet release schedule: Beta 1 (for opt-in flavors), which should be released on February 26th.